The new AA Power Board is working very nicely, but it turns out that the ferrite-core inductor is a little fragile.
This is the 10 micro-Henry inductor core, as it should be:
… and this is what happened to one of the shipments “all the way” to the UK:
(photo courtesy Steve Evans – great close-up!)
Whoops, not good!
This happened to two of the five boards shipped as part of a “5-pack”, where I placed all the boards together in a single plastic bag, along with the metal AA clips. The fact that the inductor is placed near the outside edge also probably doesn’t help…
I’ll package the boards differently from now on. But if you got these boards, please check them and let me know if they got damaged (they may still work, depends a bit on the breakage) – I’ll send out replacements for any bad boards out there, of course.
Live and learn!